"Redeeming Dating" (1 Cor 13:4-7)

Welcome to the Reformed University Fellowship at UNCW Podcast! Each week, we will post the messages from our RUF Large Group meetings at UNCW. This year, we're going to talk about God sets us free to live wisely, beautifully in his world, redeeming all of our relationships. In both this week and last week's talks we looked at our modern practice of dating, and seek to find some Biblical wisdom that will us give help and hope. (*this message contains material from several wise friends: Simon Stokes, Matt Howell and Mac Holt. It also contains an amazing poem by Wendell Berry called "Over the Edge." These wise men deserve any and all credit for the clear illustrations and insightful observations herein.) Quotes: “Most people, when they are looking for a spouse, are looking for a finished statue when they should be looking for a wonderful block of marble. Not so you can create the kind of person you want, but rather because you see what kind of person Jesus is making.”- Kathy Keller“When we are in love with someone we often appear to attend to [them] when in fact we are doing the very opposite. Instead of being attentive we are acquisitive. We use the other for our own glorification, we bask in the presence of our beloved because we enjoy the image of ourselves that is reflected back . . . This is the opposite of Christian love . ”-- Lauren Winner"The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life.Suddenly there’s a real choice to be made, not a fake consumer choice between a BlackBerry and an iPhone, but a question: Do I love this person? And, for the other person, does this person love me?There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerist order: it exposes the lie." -- Jonathan Franzen“There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is hell.”— C.S. Lewis